Survey of End-to-End Mobile Network Measurement Testbeds, Tools, and Services

Mobile (cellular) networks enable innovation, but can also stifle it and lead to user frustration when network performance falls below expectations. As mobile networks become the predominant method of Internet access, developer, research, network operator, and regulatory communities have taken an increased interest in measuring end-to-end mobile network performance to, among other goals, minimize negative impact on application responsiveness. In this survey we examine current approaches to end-to-end mobile network performance measurement, diagnosis, and application prototyping. We compare available tools and their shortcomings with respect to the needs of researchers, developers, regulators, and the public. We intend for this survey to provide a comprehensive view of currently active efforts and some auspicious directions for future work in mobile network measurement and mobile application performance evaluation.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. arXiv does not format the URL references correctly. For a correctly formatted version of this paper go to http://www.cs.montana.edu/mwittie/publications/Goel14Survey.pd

Internet Traffic Characterization

: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : xii 1 Introduction : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 1 1. The problem : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 1 2. Overview of thesis : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 2 3. Contribution of our work : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 3 2 Taxonomy of traffic characteristics : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 5 1. Aggregation granularity : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 5 2. Host versus network centric perspective : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 7 3. Host centric perspective : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 7 1. Delay and jitter : : : : : ..

Application of Sampling Methodologies to Network Traffic Characterization

The relative performance of different data collection methods in the assessment of various traffic parameters is significant when the amount of data generated by a complete trace of a traffic interval is computationally overwhelming, and even capturing summary statistics for all traffic is impractical. This paper presents a study of the performance of various methods of sampling in answering questions related to wide area network traffic characterization. Using a packet trace from a network environment that aggregates traffic from a large number of sources, we simulate various sampling approaches, including time-driven and event-driven methods, with both random and deterministic selection patterns, at a variety of granularities. Using several metrics which indicate the similarity between two distributions, we then compare the sampled traces to the parent population. Our results revealed that the timetriggered techniques did not perform as well as the packettriggered ones. Furthermore, ..

Measurement Considerations for Assessing Unidirectional Latencies

This paper presents a study of single direction latencies to selected destinations of the Internet utilizing a variety of paths. The objective is to demonstrate that round-trip latencies are an insufficient and sometimes misleading method to determine unidirectional delays. This claim has significant implications for high-speed, multi-application, wide area, traffic aggregating networking environments which often require predictability of precise delay. Keywords: measurement, delay, unidirectional, jitter, latency. 1 Introduction In the Internet community a common method for assessing network latencies is to measure round trip delivery time, the time it takes for a packet to get to and return from a target host. Dividing this value in half to arrive at an outgoing or return latency implicitly assumes that the path to a target host is symmetric. There are both static and dynamic components of transmission latencies which contribute to inaccuracies of this method. Statically, the..

Traffic Characteristics of the T1 NSFNET Backbone

This paper presents the results of a measurement study of the T1 NSFNET backbone. We first discuss the measurement environment and approach to data collection. We then present measurements results for: long-term growth in traffic volume, including attribution to domains and protocols; trend in average packet size on the network, both over long and medium term intervals; most popular sources, destinations, and site pairs; traffic locality; international distribution of traffic; mean utilization statistics, both of the overall backbone as well as of specific links of interest; and delay statistics